Free The Gold Falcon by Katharine Kerr Page A

said. “Let the ravens pull him to pieces.”
    Gerran dismounted, and Salamander joined him. Together they pulled up the wood stakes and threw back the blankets. Flies rose in a black cloud of outraged buzzing. For a moment Gerran almost vomited, and Salamander took a few quick steps back.
    The corpse was human, naked, lying on his back, and he’d been staked out with thick iron nails hammered through the palm of each hand and the arch of each foot. Judging from the amount of dried blood around each stake, he’d been alive for the process and perhaps for a little while after. He was bearded in blood, too, because he’d gnawed his own lips half away in his agony. Where his eyes had been black ants swarmed. At some point in this ghastly process the Horsekin had slit him from breech to breastbone and pulled out his internal organs. In a pulsing mass of ants they lay in tidy lines to either side of him, bladder, guts, kidneys, liver, and lungs, but the heart was missing.
    “What—who in the name of the Lord of Hell would do such a thing?” Gerran could only whisper. “Ye gods, savages! That’s all they are!”
    “In the name of Alshandra, more likely.” Salamander sounded half-sick. “I’ve heard about this, but I’ve never seen it before, and I thank all the true gods for that, too.”
    “What have you heard?”
    “That they do this to selected prisoners, always men, and usually someone who’s been stupid enough to surrender. They send them with messages to Alshandra’s country. That’s somewhere in the Otherlands, I suppose.” Salamander paused to wipe his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt. He swallowed heavily, then turned away from the sight. “As the prisoner’s dying, they tell him he’s lucky, because their goddess will give him a favored place in her land of the dead.”
    “I hope to every god that he lied when he got there.”
    “That’s why they keep the heart. If he lies, they say, they’ll torture it, and he’ll feel the pains in the Otherlands.”
    Gerran tried to curse, but he could think of nothing foul enough. He turned away and saw that even Cadryc had gone white about the mouth.
    “Let’s bury him,” the tieryn said. “And then we’re heading home. There’s naught else we can do for him or any of the other poor souls they took.”
    “Good idea, your grace.” Gerran pointed to a pair of riders. “You—take the latrine shovels and dig him a proper grave.”
    As they dismounted, Gerran heard a raven calling out from overhead. He glanced up and saw a single large bird circling—abnormally large, as he thought about it. With a flap of its wings it flew away fast, heading east. Gerran turned to mention it to Salamander, but the gerthddyn had walked some yards away and fallen to his knees. He appeared to be ridding himself of his breakfast in a noisy though understandable fashion. And after all, Gerran told himself, there’s naught strange about a corpse-bird come to carrion. He put the matter out of his mind.

    Everyone was very kind. Perhaps that was the most painful thing of all, this unspoken kindness, or so Neb thought. None of the other servants resented his sudden arrival into a position of importance. They gave him things to put in his chamber—a pottery vase from the chamberlain, a wood bench from the cook, a wicker charcoal-basket from the head groom’s wife. One of the grooms gave Neb a nearly-new shirt embroidered with the tieryn’s blazon of a wolf rampant; his wife gave Clae a leather ball that had been her son’s before he went off to his prenticeship. Neb saw every gift as an aching reminder that he’d been stripped of kin the way he stripped a quill of feathers when he made a pen.
    But it’s better than starving, Neb would forcibly remind himself. It was also better than being enslaved by Horsekin, but Neb did his best to keep from thinking about that. In the farming village he’d had two friends, boys his own age who were most likely dead now, and their